Historie. Jahrbuch des Zentrums für Historische Forschung Berlin der Polnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften

The European Union is a complex, compartmentalised and multi-faceted organisation, albeit an integrative one. It attempts to unite 27 different economic, political, cultural, social and legal traditions. The Union reflects the diversity of legal and political modernity forms, but does not break with the paradigm of the modern state with its independent constitutional structure. The European Union has become halfway between a supranational organisation and a federation. Like in a laboratory, it generates bold and new, specific and unique solutions, not all of which, however, might lead to the expected success.

The article focuses on the reactions of the Polish population following the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. After almost two years of Nazi occupation, society was exhausted by the oppression imposed by the German occupiers and longingly awaited the end of the war. Among both the Polish and Jewish populations, the German attack on the Soviet Union raised hopes for a German defeat and the imminent end of hostilities. As a result, 22 June 1941 became a moment that united many Poles and Jews into a shared emotional community, who perceived the outbreak of the German–Soviet war in a positive light, accompanied by high expectations and far-reaching hopes.

Plans for rebuilding Warsaw, destroyed during the Second World War, began to be developed already in February 1945 with the es-tablishment of the Bureau for the Rebuilding of the Capital (BOS). Intensive work by the BOS led to the reconstruction of Warsaw's historic buildings, mainly from the 17th, 18th and partly the 19th century. This first phase was largely completed in 1952, although the reconstruction and renovation of many historic buildings con-tinued into the 1960s. At the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, there were also heated debates among BOS employees about reconstruction strategies. The discussions were characterized both by the ideas of functionalism developed in the pre-war period and by the ideological principles of Stalinism. The second phase began in the 1970s with the plan initiated by the communist go-vernment to rebuild Warsaw's Royal Castle and Ujazdowski Castle. This first project in particular mobilized the public in Poland and abroad, which also supported the reconstruction of the Royal Castle financially. There were rather unofficial discussions about the aims of the national policy of remembrance and the possibility of preser-ving the Royal Castle ruins as a memorial to war crimes. The third phase began after the fall of communism in 1989 and focused on the hitherto inconclusive debates about the reconstruction of the Saxon Palace, which had been an important element of the urban axes of the city center from the mid-18th century until its destruc-tion in 1944. At the same time, numerous memorial projects com-memorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 were implemented during the so-called transfor-mation period, which led to a redesign of the urban landscape of remembrance.

The article presents the process of the rebuilding of Malbork Castle, from the destruction wrought by the Red Army from January to March 1945 to the reconstruction of the giant mosaic statue of Our Lady in the years 2013-2016. Based on the post-war daily press the socio-political background of this process, controversial from the point of view of ‘ordinary Poles’, is discussed.. The author high-lights the lack of consensus among specialists (historians, art histo-rians, conservators) as to how the reconstruction should proceed, which patterns, epochs and periods should be referred to, which elements should be removed and which ought to be emphasised, with Stanisław Lorentz's views being quoted as a particularly radical anti-German voice in the debate. In the following sections of the article, the process of rebuilding and reconstructing the individual elements is discussed in detail, with reference to important caesuras such as the fire which broke out in 1959, which, despite its disast-rous consequences, contributed to reviving public interest in the castle reconstruction. The author also presents the history of the castle under the Polish rule (1466-1772), including the fact that it served as a prison, where the family of Tsar Vasyl Shuisky was im-prisoned, the fact that understandably did not arouse the enthu-siasm of the Soviet authorities. On the one hand, the rebuilt castle was to serve as a kind of mausoleum of the martyrdom of the Poles (and native old Prussians) under the Teutonic yoke, while on the other hand it was to be a symbol of the moral defeat of the enemy. Finally, other factors that influenced the decision to rebuild the cas-tle are discussed (the relatively small number of objects under con-servation care in this area compared to e. g. Lower Silesia, or the fact that the decision-makers of the time placed medieval art far above the value of the Baroque). The author also lists rebuilt Teu-tonic Order’s castles or parts thereof, such as their baileys, in places other than Malbork. Die Marienburg 1945-2016. Ein Wiederaufbau im Zeichen ... 85

As early as 2012, the German-Polish Textbook Commission em-phasised the central category of experience in its recommendations for a German-Polish history textbook. This article argues that the increased inclusion of ego-documents in textbooks since 2014 has significantly improved the conditions for a history of ex-perience and everyday life between 1939 and 1945. I postulate that when analysing ego-documents in educational media, it is crucial to include curricular guidelines, the way in which ego-documents are contextualised and combined with photographs. As my analysis of educational media shows, there has been significant progress in communicating the historical experiences of Germans and Poles, even if persistent challenges remain.

History holds a special role in European culture, being a medium for shaping critical think-ing and a multi-perspective view of reali-ty. Meanwhile, one of the most spectacular changes influencing the presence of history in the public sphere in the last decade is the process of democratisation of history and historical remembrance. The phenomenon of widespread in-terest in the past has led to the emergence of new forms of communication that appear in the pub-lic space on an equal footing with historical knowledge. The multi-plicity of means of communication as well as the ambiguity of the objectives pursued goes beyond the practices adopted by historians, who nevertheless, while losing their monopoly on the transmission of knowledge about the past, remain experts in critical reflection and analysis of the image of the past.

The textbook series Europe. Our History / Europa – Unsere Ge-schichte combines the per-spective typical of post-structural histo-riography and micro-historical approaches, drawing on the expe-rience of Polish and German history didactics. While working with the textbook, an open view of the past is shaped. This ap-proach does not impose any axioms or „revealed truths“. On the contrary, the narrative of these handbooks shows that history is a process and that a contemporary image of the past is created by the changing today's circumstances. The key didactic principles of the created vision of the past include, firstly, multi-perspectivism: the quoted sources show events from a variety of historical points of view.